Gerard Fanning

There’s been a clearing in the gardens – lavish sycamores, some holly and beech, cut down in the dead of night.

And from such absences, local rooks eye up the far canopies, leafy and windy like Gaudí. Strung through top tiers

chichi nests appear, one bed apartments, ‘old world style’, far from that ‘young family thing’, and at two thousand a month...

In this broad church of reeds and grasses at the north-west tip of Booterstown Marsh

two marker posts wait for a lick of Hammerite or windy gloss

to cosy up like a ruined script, to connive in a channel or spit

like that cut from Leitrim’s village wharf or the eel-like shimmy of the lonely

Scarriff River, but stall mid-sentence bumping up against the blacktop

of an endless...

If you ask how a colour might come about consider the enigma of water determined by sky, and by water I don’t mean pool or rain barrel but the wide expanse of sea or lake. As with all things, this will depend on where and when you look because water absorbs light, and sea water absorbs the larger truths of late evening greater than the timid blue of morning. So if sunlight...

Boat piers are much alike. Stepping ashore at The Stone House, Doused in the inky stream of Acres Lake

We walk a tarmacadam line Where curvature comes together As strands of carmine

Climb through migrant sprays Of laburnum and maple. In a wait that slowly accumulates

Until too long, hours refract, And like a tiptoeing through a glass lean-to We examine the stills of this romance –

The...